If everything goes as planned, you will get watch your parents die when you’re in middle age.
I’m lucky. I was 57 when I lost my Mom, 55 when I lost my Dad. I had to look after my mom for 13 months. Dad had a bad week at the end; Mom had a bad month, and a few years of dementia that left most of her personality intact.
So it’s been 10 months. Over a hundred days. And I struggle daily now, with their memory, the memory of the indignity and misery of death, and my own and my kid’s mortality.
I’ve got a therapist and two kids and the partner; but one is away at college, my spouses parents both gone for 8 years, and our lives feel emptier in ways that are hard to articulate. You feel like you’re forgetting something. Most of the time.
So, I talk to my Mom and Dad as I walk, everyday, with the earbuds in, and the conversations are not that long; they hit the same notes mostly; they include stuff I never said when they were alive. And stuff I said all the time.
How’s it going? I love you.
Now I add stuff, about how little I saw them the last thirty years. About why that was. I say the things I wish I’d said.
Their voices dim. The conversations seem less and less real, less necessary. The pain recedes, merging now with my terror of my own death, which now feels really real. I meditate, walk, and fast.
Life is less fun. The world still achingly beautiful, but I look at the trees I have watched grow for twenty five years, in and around where I live, remembering how small they were, and think, if all goes as planned, the little trees I see how will get as high, but no higher, and that’s the last time that happens. I watched my kids for 25 years, and if I’m lucky I get to see them start to look like I do now, in 25 years.
And those 25 years?
Fucking flew by. Flew by. That’s the terrifying part.
My life is flying by, and I’m typing this note to a few friends and strangers. The people I love, that I fall in love with, that I used to love, that have written me off and drifted away; to the ones I love that I will never see again but in dreams and memories.
Hey Mom. Hey Dad. How’s it going?
We’re all Okay.
You had great lives. Could hardly ask for more.
But I miss you. I’ll never get to know you any better.
And I’ll admit now, which I never do, in my conversations, that that was my fault as well as their’s.
I enjoy reading your thoughts particularly on how you deal with the death of your parents. I lost my Mom in 2006. The line about not getting to know them better struck me. My Mom had lung cancer that spread to her brain. If affected her personality and she was never quite the same after the brain surgery. She did however share some stories that I had never heard before. I wish we had talked more when we had the chance.
People tell you this, after they lose your parents, and you know, you think you’ve done this, sometimes, but then they’re gone and there’s no way to know them better. To know what they remember about you, about growing up.
My father gave us a little toy pinball machine when I was in first or second grade; he had to build it, and at first, he put the legs on backward, so it was slanted away from the paddles; it took him all night to get it ready for Christmas morning.
I wish I’d asked him about that. If he remembered that. I’m guessing he always did.
We didn’t play with it for very long. My mother was very efficient at throwing away old or broken toys.